Posted
by
CmdrTacoon Thursday September 24, 2009 @10:37AM
from the four-is-better-right dept.

Barence writes "Intel has stunned visitors at IDF by showing off the world's first four-screen laptop. The oddly-named 'Tangent Bay' has three miniature touchscreens set horizontally into the case below the main, full-sized panel. It is a fully functional prototype: delegates were able to scroll photos around the touchscreens by swiping with a finger. The idea smacked a little too much of the ill-fated Vista SideShow." Seems strange that they would put the screens above the keyboard. I think embedding an iPhone type touchscreen in place of the trackpad would be a far more useful thing.

Actually, when done correctly it works good. Myself I have Logitech G19 Gaming Keyboard [logitech.com], which has 320x240 color LCD on the top of keyboard. Now I dont play much, but I find the keyboard really nice with its extra buttons that you can use for macros etc (and I get teh nerdy "command center" feel;)

The main thing I use it for is the cpu/ram meters. I know I could get it on the screen aswell, but I dont like that as I tend to run everything on fullscreen.. browser, visual studio, irc and just alt-tab between them. That is why desktop widgets dont work, because I never see them. On the other hand always-on-top widgets would be in the way all the time. But when its running on the lcd screen on keyboard that I dont all the time use for something else, its nice.

Another thing that I frequently use with the LCD is the YouTube player. When people paste some youtube link, I copy it to clipboard and instead of opening new browser tab and bringing it on top of the screen, it starts playing on the lcd screen. That way I can watch the video without actually putting all my concentration on it.

The screen is also great for providing all kinds of information from various programs, like chat windows, irc, rss reader, music player, stats or healthbars and so on in games. On an interesting note, someone even developed a counter-strike hack that used the lcd screen to display its menu and a radar. That way there wasn't any hack related menus etc on the actual screen, so screenshots didn't catch it.

However it looks like you would be looking at that laptop's screens from 45 or higher angle, which cant be that nice. Maybe they could had added another surface between screen and keyboard so that it would be angled better. But like the article says, its just a prototype to show off intel's experiements, and not likely a product.

Extra small screens can be really useful. It's a great place to show information or content that would get in the way if it was on your actual monitor. Having second monitor on side usually tends to go into other purposes and isn't usually on the view as good as lcd on top of your keyboard.

Yes, and if one extra small screen is useful, think how useful 3 will be. That's right! 3 times more useful. Of course, making it publically known like that was a mistake. As soon as they release it, you can bet that one of their competitors will release a laptop with 4 small screens. Then they won't look so clever. Start selling your intel shares now folks.

I really do have fewer cuts and nicks with more blades - I think the applied force is spread over more blades reducing the pressure on any given blade - either that or the angle of incidence of the blades is more controlled.

What do you do with your computer that makes CPU/RAM meters something you look at often?

I ask this because I was searching for a theme to dim Snow Leopard and I kept running across these very busy desktops with all sorts of meters and such on them. I do a whole bunch of Photoshop, and a lot of video editing, so my computers tend to be well stocked with CPU and RAM, which I did specifically because I don't want to have to pay attention to the machine's r

Quite simple actually, they tell you when you need to start closing stuff. See my computers often get laggy because I'm doing many things at once and it's useful to know who the culprit is. Did I forget to shut down a tab with flash in it, or did something hang in the background and made everything crap. Often with two cores you'll get a hung app and not notice for a few days before you tax the other core enough to start problems.

Yep, thats the thing. Those hanging programs are even more of a problem with quad core, since they only hang one of them so you dont really notice. But when the meter shows that one core is all the time taking 100%, you know some program has hanged.

Interestingly I noticed this on my laptop just a few days ago. Things weren't as fast, but not really slow either. When I happened to look at the process monitor, I found that Firefox had been hanging there for a few days taking 50% of cpu:)

> Interestingly I noticed this on my laptop just a few days ago. Things weren't as fast, but not really slow either. When I happened to look at the process monitor, I found that Firefox had been hanging there for a few days taking 50% of cpu:)

On Windows you can just run task manager - it minimizes to an icon and you can see if something is wedged. Actually on a laptop it's pretty easy to tell even without looking because you can hear the fan spin up.

While I am not the person you are asking, I use a CPU meter when I have an operation running such as indexing a large drive or case file. Some of these contain almost a terabyte of data and it takes my 8 core machine several hours or days to complete. While the indexing process is underway, the program just shows a status message of "Indexing... Please wait" If this process crashes nothing changes on the program, but the cpu load will drop to normal form 100% usage. I would LOVE to have a small 3-7" screen

It's almost like we need some kind of "Dashboard" for little widgets that we want easy access to, but don't want to clutter our screen with all the time.

I guess I'm not a fan of this display concept since it could be duplicated with a taller screen and software, but with the additional flexibility of using the extra space as part of the main display area.

What's with all the hype about touch screens? And THREE of them? What possible use could the third one serve when no OS I know of plays nicely with even the first one? Do they have fingerprint protection at least?

Yes, it looks cool, I'll give you that. But so does the 3 megabytes of xorg.conf to make them work properly, and you still don't get application support.

Each subscreen could act as a mini-desktop so that you could "minimize" an application like a browser or video to a smaller screen and still run your main app full screen in the large LCD while keeping an eye on other apps. You'd be able to run multiple apps without losing any screen real estate. Likewise, a quick tap could bring the application to the main screen and minimize the other app to an open subscreen. This could be implemented in the OS and wouldn't

Now, don't jump down my throat just yet. Yes, I realize these are not for most people, but your "minimize" idea reminded me of dwm and xmonad's default tiling behavior. While replacing standard window managers with things like dwm and xmonad wouldn't be acceptable, perhaps standard window managers should be extended with faculties that allow easy tiling when desired. Supplying this particular need with hardware s

They dont need to be interacting all the time. This can be really useful for things like cpu/ram monitor, chatting, now playing or video. The another example people have here is the multidesktop thing, where you could change between desktops with the mini screens. Of course nothing world exploding, but small things like these can be quite useful.

You only have one set of eyes, they can only focus on so much. With a high resolution display, we already have things like CPU/RAM monitors/etc already in a single display, maybe on a toolbar or on a status bar. So what is the difference if we put it somewhere else *away* from what you are looking at, other than inconvenience? I don't mean this as a personal attack to you, I am inquiring to you directly.

Just like how MS lets you minimize the task manager, or the windows/linux/any os system tray?

I actually don't like having the windows bar at the bottom, but I find the auto-hide thingy too annoying. If I am doing work, I don't like to have distracting things all over my screen. I tend to be more productive if my screen is less cluttered. The screen is my area of focus. If I had other, smaller screens, I could put widgets on them and they would be easily accessible. But, I could completely ignore them better when I am trying to focus, and it would also make my screen look a lot less cluttered.

Then if I want to see them I have to go search for them in the task bar. I am not saying that I think little screens would be in any way worth the extra cost (at this point). But, I can see being very useful for some things if they were relatively cheap.

unlock the taskbar so changes can occurclick the windows taskbar in a blank areadrag the taskbar off the bottom-like to the side....

I use a 24wide in landscape mode, next to a 20wide in portrait orientation off to the rightdepending on the task at hand, my taskbar is on the left side of the 24"monitor or on the right side of the 20either way it's about the same height, & I can read enough of the titles to intelligently pick the window I want at the front.

There's a Logitech G19 gaming keyboard with an LCD that can play You Tube videos. Lots of laptops have a low res OLED screen for information.

No basically.

I remember back in the old days it was really useful to run SoftIce on a mono card while you were doing full screen stuff on an SVGA one. Maybe you could use it to run a text mode console so you can fix your xorg.conf when the main display is fubar.

I think the point about the number of screens is valid, but not the point about lack of compatibility. This is concept design. Obviously nothing supports it yet. Why would anything support it if it's in existence?

I'm also willing to bet that at the show they demonstrated other UI abilities that the article didn't talk about

I'm also willing to bet that at the show they demonstrated other UI abilities that the article didn't talk about

I'm willing to bet that if such abilities existed, they would have made it not just into the article, but the summary as well. Maybe selective zooming for Photoshop or something, once it'll support this.

The keyboard + mouse combination is a powerful one, there are basically no UI input problems that need to be solved anymore.

They only really need two large touch screens: one for the monitor, and one for the keyboard. In a laptop form factor, it's even better, because you can turn it sideways like the dual-screen e-book readers to make one huge screen, or present two interfaces for on-the-spot multiplayer gaming.

I dunno, being able to see the other desktops is certainly a boon. Also, how is 'CTRL+ALT+arrow key' easier than 'touch the desktop that looks like the one you want'? Hell, even your grandmother could do the second one.

It's probably not worth the money for most people right now, but if PC enthusiasts cared about how much it cost to make their e-peens bigger, we wouldn't have titanium computer cases with elaborite window artwork showcasing a UV-reactive liquid cooling setup in the shape of the Ark of the

Also, how is 'CTRL+ALT+arrow key' easier than 'touch the desktop that looks like the one you want'? Hell, even your grandmother could do the second one.

True. But my grandmother doesn't keep her hands in the "home" position on the keyboard. By "easier" I meant "more efficient over thousands of uses" not "more intuitive to understand how to use the first time". Moving a hand away from keyboard, and then back, each time I want to switch desktops is significantly more inefficient - and this is based on months of experience working with a KVM switch placed right in front of my keyboard.

I use VirtuaWin on XP and have Alt+(1|2|3|4) to change to my desktops, which is pretty easy, and I never took a typing class. And the only parts of my body actually above my desk are my forearms and head. So I'm not exactly sitting in ergonomic positions. And it's still very easy for me. Plus I have these icons in the task bar that let me switch using my mouse, which on my ThinkPad is a trackpoint, so I never take my hands off the keyboard.

I know this is OT -- go ahead a mod me as such -- but I can't figure out how to tag a story. Clicking on the disclosure triangle next to the tags doesn't work, and I've tried several different browsers. Can someone enlighten me?

...it only works if you use the "Firehose". Click on Firehose link, and from there click on "Stories".Now you have all the +/- thingamajigs, tagging works. And it will keep working as long as you use "the hose".Bastards! Now I have to do some extra clicking every time I want to tag everything "dick", "fuck", "cunt", "sucks", "ass" and other useful tags.

Oh... Firefox 3.5.3 here. But it was the same for the earlier versions as well.

I'm not sure why they didn't use a screen for the mouse pad like the iphone. Then at least you could make the touchpad extremely useful. I remember there was a rumor (never came true) that the macbook pros were going to do this.

fictitious "homer" car from the simpsons. if you're too stupid to transition from the tactile meat world to a more abstract concept based environment like the internet, dont worry! we've included three extra touch screens for you to poke and rub like a caveman at the pretty pictures you can only begin to comprehend directly through interaction!

feel free to eventually accost your IT guys with this laptop, and brag about its advanced capabilities compared to their single screen dinosaurs. After all, more screens means more smarter and productive.

It reminds me of the Concept Keyboard, where you had a grid of buttons and could print out overlays that showed what they meant, and map them to sequences of key presses in software. This was great because you could define application-specific layouts very easily. Being able to define both the meaning and the label in software for a row of buttons (which can also act like trackpads) has a lot of potential applications.

If you pull up the picture in full detail, you can notice that the three touch screen were bundled together in the demo for a film strip effect. In fact you can see one picture across two screens.

Personally I like the concept of the smaller "informational" screen. I don't have anything specific visualized yet but I'm sure it can come in handy, working with a list of emails, a calendar, and perhaps a seperate IM screen, etc.

Another possible use is to take advantage of the Aero effect from Vista (or m

To which Gillette replied, "Fuck everything, we're doing five screens!"

- RG>

LOL. Reall funny. Never quite realize why Proctor and Gamble would not enter into the consumer electronic business. They hire enough engineers each year to make something like that work, and they have the marketing machines to push any products into the market!

It could be interesting - when you wanted to use it as a book, turn it 90% and you have a familiar form factor. Everybody will whine about the touch keyboard, but pretty much all laptop keyboards are a poor compromise anyways (sorry Apple, we know you tried). Include a free bluetooth keyboard in the box to quiet them down.

People periodically do that because they are idiots who are incapable of learning from the mistakes of others. The reason that we still use mechanical keyboards is that the tactile feedback is useful and that pressing on something that deforms slightly is much less damaging to your muscles and joints than something that doesn't deform. Replacing the trackpad with a touchscreen is a good idea with a lot of uses, and so is augmenting the keyboard with touchscreens, but replacing the keyboard with something

Yes, the optimus tacticus I linked to above tends to gets universally bad reviews due to no tactile response causing slow and inaccurate typing.

To me, nothing says quality like a good old IBM model m keyboard. Big heavy keys that go click. With the weight and durability to bash someone over the head and get back to typing without damaging the keyboard.

the Atari 400 sucked because it had a membrane keyboard with little-to-no tactile feedback. Typing on those things SUCKED; touch typing was a near-impossibility, and those "keys" were slightly raised. Even many laptop keyboards suck ass for touch typing. Are you seriously suggesting that keyboards become totally flat, Star Trek:TNG style?

Seriously, I don't get the warm fuzzies from the current video driver manufacturers fro normal laptops in either Wintendo or Linux, I can't imagine the support nightmare for a laptop with one main screen and three sub-screens.

This is a prototype, not a production machine and there isn't anyone making very long thin touchscreens. Intel put three standard screens (I presume something like 800x480 resolution, the sort most high-end smartphones use) into a laptop chassis. On a production machine there would be a purpose-built touchscreen (2400 x 480 pixels perhaps) occupying the same space as the three displays do in the prototype.

I don't know about you guys, but I am fine with just ONE SCREEN. I don't get all the hype about this. It's just one large monitor and three small ones. Hooray. I'll admit it's cool for about a second, but once the novelty wears off, do you really care? Maybe if the software takes advantage of multiple screens (like the DS... sort of), I'll be interested, but for now, I don't think there are many uses for this... yet.
Come back in 2014 and then we'll see.

come on now, "the world's first four-screen laptop", really? Those 3 little touchscreens are so small, I had to look at the pictures a 2nd time to see where the screens were because I was looking at the one large one we think about when we talk about a laptop screen. So then my old Thinkpad was a dual screen because there was a tiny LCD above the keyboard?

Intel has stunned visitors at IDF by showing off the world's first four-screen laptop. The oddly-named 'Tangent Bay' has three miniature touchscreens set horizontally into the case below the main, full-sized panel. It is a fully functional prototype: delegates were able to scroll photos around the touchscreens by swiping with a finger. The idea smacked a little too much of the ill-fated Vista SideShow.

Four-screen laptop? I expected a laptop with 4 roughly full-sized screens. Not one full-sized screen and three tiny ones. And those three tiny ones, due to their positioning, may as well be one oddly-shaped screen.

Seems strange that they would put the screens above the keyboard. I think embedding an iPhone type touchscreen in place of the trackpad would be a far more useful thing.

While I agree that an iPhone type touchscreen could be very handy instead of a trackpad... I can also see some utility having those screens above the keyboard. It could be a nice way to display additional information without cluttering up your workspace - maybe the toolbars for Photo Shop, or

Hey Dell! Update the M6400 with this and the i7 please! Oh, and be sure Linux fully supports it; preferably OpenSUSE and Kubuntu. OpenSolaris support would be a nice bonus as well.

Seriously though this would be an excellent feature in mainstream workstation replacements. How about firing up an IDE with a dedicated screen for the debugger, one for resource monitoring, and of course, one for watching hulu while you work?

saying the computer has 4 screens sounds good, but wouldn't it be more useful if the 3 small screens were just one very wide screen, it could then still be treated as 3 screens when that is what is needed but could also have other applications where you need the information to not have 2 gaps in it.

I thought it was silly to put a computer screen in a refigerator door. But with the cost of video becoming vanishing small (you can by a cell phone at 7-11 for less than $10), what interesting things could you do with video everywhere? It would be a world with Minority Report walls and Harry Potter newspapers. An interesting recent application is the reburbished San Francisco Acadamy of Sciences Museum. They completely replace exhibit and room nameplates with small photoscreens. This way they can be more c

Yo dawg, I heard you liked LCD screens, so we put an screen in your screen in your screen in your screen in your laptop so you can watch porn while you watch porn while you code while you watch more porn.